The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women [Hardcover]

Susan Douglas (Author), Meredith Michaels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2004

Susan Douglas first took on the media's misrepresentation of women in her funny, scathing social commentary "Where the Girls Are." Now, she and Meredith Michaels, have turned a sardonic (but never jaundiced) eye toward the cult of the new momism: a trend in American culture that is causing women to feel that only through the perfection of motherhood can true contentment be found. This vision of motherhood is highly romanticized and yet its standards for success remain forever out of reach, no matter how hard women may try to "have it all."

"The Mommy Myth" takes a provocative tour through the past thirty years of media images about mothers: the superficial achievements of the celebrity mom, the news media's sensational coverage of dangerous day care, the staging of the "mommy wars" between working mothers and stay-at-home moms, and the onslaught of values-based marketing that raises mothering standards to impossible levels, just to name a few. In concert with this messaging, the authors contend, is a conservative backwater of talking heads propagating the myth of the modern mom.

This nimble assessment of how motherhood has been shaped by out-of-date mores is not about whether women should have children or not, or about whether once they have kids mothers should work or stay at home. It is about how no matter what they do or how hard they try, women will never achieve the promised nirvana of idealized mothering. Douglas and Michaels skillfully map the distance traveled from the days when "The Feminine Mystique" demanded more for women than the unpaid labor of keeping house and raising children, to today's not-so-subtle pressure to reverse this thirty-year trend. A must-read forevery woman.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Does Martha Stewart make you feel like you never do enough for your kids? Do "celebrity mom" profiles leave you feeling lumpen and inadequate? That's because they're supposed to, say Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, authors of The Mommy Myth and self-professed "mothers with an attitude." Both scathing and self-deprecating, their pop-culture critique takes on "the new momism," the media's obsession with motherhood and the impossible standards which that obsession promotes. Today's ideal mom makes June Cleaver seem like a layabout: she may work outside the home, but never too much, always looks at the world through her children's eyes, makes sure to buy only educational, age-appropriate toys, and includes a loving note with each hand-prepared lunch. Meanwhile, the news media hype stories about child abduction, politicians excoriate so-called "welfare queens," and parenting experts advocate wearing your child in a sling until he moves out on his own. Romanticized, commercialized, sensationalized, and demonized by turns, today's mothers are damned if they work and damned if they don't; what’s more, the idea that the government might do something to help their plight has come to seem almost quaint. As a history of motherhood in the media from 1970 to the present, The Mommy Myth makes a fun and thought-provoking read. Yet close readings of episodes of thirtysomething don't create quite the call to arms the authors seem to have in mind; no woman likes to think of herself as a media dupe, particularly the kind of woman who will be reading this book. Straightforward policy critiques like their chilling chapter on childcare fare much better, illuminating a culture that seems to have forgotten public institutions' power to correct social ills. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

In the idealized myth, mothers and babies spend their days discovering the wonders of life, reading, playing and laughing. Mom wears her baby in a sling, never raises her voice and of course has unlimited time and patience. Baby grows up safe, happy and respectful. In real life, however, it's a different story. Douglas (Where the Girls Are) and Smith College philosophy professor Michaels, "mothers with an attitude problem," blow the lid off "new momism," "a set of ideals... that seem on the surface to celebrate motherhood, but which in reality promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond [a mother's] reach." The authors examine the past 30 years of television, radio, movies, magazines and advertising to show that the bar has been increasingly raised for "the standards of good motherhood while singling out and condemning those we were supposed to see as dreadful mothers" (notably harried working mothers). Using ample humor (e.g., buy the wrong toys and your child will "end up a semiliterate counter girl in Dunkin' Donuts for life"), abundant examples and an approachable style, Douglas and Michaels incriminate not just Republican administrations and Dr. Laura, but also celebrity mothers, Drs. Spock and the evening news. While the authors are occasionally repetitive and sometimes condescend to moms who stay at home, their thought-provoking, accessible foray critiquing new momism will be of interest to liberal mothers-and possibly fathers-helping them to judge the media's images of motherhood with a more critical eye.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (February 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743259998
• ISBN-13: 978-0743259996
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #619,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mistakenly attacks attachment parenting, August 8, 2004

By 

Vesna Kovach "duonexus" (Madison, Wis. USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (Hardcover)

Sisterhood should be powerful -- but after a brief heyday a constellation of religious, political, and commercial forces managed to split apart the bonds formed during the women's movement.

A central theme of The Mommy Myth is the ways women have been set against each other -- black vs. white, rich vs. poor, careerist vs. stay-at-home, parent vs. nonparent, -- in a series of sensationalized media catfights, thus destroying and/or subverting most of the gains of feminism.

A fascinating overview of media distortion and cultural brainwashing on such topics as "welfare mothers" (the proportions of welfare recipients who are black, who are single black women with more than two children, or who are teen mothers, are far, far from what the public has been led to believe) and news coverage of nonevents like Satanic day care sex rings and "crack babies" (turns out there's no such thing).

The chapter on marketing to children ("targets," according to the industry) is chlling.

Book is marred by overuse of cutesy, hip language: way too many "whatever"s "No, no, no"s and similes drawn from famous names in pop culture. But that alone didn't lose it the fifth star.

The worst flaw, in my opinion, is Douglas' and Michaels' serious misreading of attachment parenting. Reading over some of the reviews here, it seems that lost them a lot of symphathetic readers, too. Attachment parenting simply is not part of the artificially intensified mothering phenonmenon that the authors are exposing here. It's not a "fad" and it doesn't make mothers feel inadequate. In fact, one reason that I like it -- and the reason why I believe it when proponent Sears claims it's natural -- is because it's so much easier. Baby cries? Pick him or her up. Baby doesn't like to sleep alone? No big mystery -- who does? Why stick 'em in the crib and then create sleep problems that then must be solved?

I agree with the attachment parent who was disturbed by their recommendation that a couple should leave their 8-month-old with a grandparent for an entire week. That equates with recommending that the 8-month-old should already be weaned. Book contains several more obvious anti-breastfeeding statements as well.

But then, this book is not, as many reader reviews here point out, a parenting book. It's a historical and political book. Its strength is in the startling picture it paints of a culture that is apparently determined to keep gender stereotypes enforced and keep each sex in its place. Media myths of good parenting are totally dismantled.

I was left curious as to what their idea of good parenting might actually be.

84 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars hilariously funny, if only it weren't so sad, February 17, 2004

By 

Corin Goodwin (GiftedHomeschoolers.org) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (Hardcover)

This is a terrific book! I thought I'd just skim through it like so many of these kinds of books, but I find myself not wanting to miss a word. Every few pages I grab my husband and read a few lines aloud to him. I can SO relate to so much of what these ladies wrote, even though I definitely don't always agree with them... and isn't that the point? There are as many ways to be a fulfilled woman as there are human beings with two X chromosomes.

I love the way most of this book is written and I think it's hilariously funny except that it's not, iykwim. It's a very pithy history of feminism and 'good mother'hood -- what they are, what they're not, what they could be, and what various folks would like you to think they should be -- from the perspective of 'real' women (ie not 'experts') with real opinions which they are unafraid of expressing.

For the most part, I highly recommend this book. As women of all ages, we should know about and understand the context in which we are living our lives.

*** (Caveat: Parts of the last chapter can be skipped entirely. I think that's where the authors themselves got a wee bit sidetracked and possibly even a mite self-righteous. It is apparently inconceivable to them that some women might make choices different from theirs for reasons that don't fit so well into the binary paradigm the authors have attempted to describe. Rather than taking sides in the "Mommy Wars" perhaps they might have returned to their original proposition that many women are ambivalent about their life choices; in truth, there are trade offs no matter what you do, and life choices span a range of A to Z, not merely A or B. It's a shame, because I really LOVED the rest of this book. It's still very much worth reading, and offers PLENTY of food for thought.) ***

52 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book whose time has come, March 28, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (Hardcover)

A straight-talking critique of the Cult of the Perfect Mom, told with a healthy dollop of exasperation. The authors deconstruct this image -- peddled relentlessly by our media -- and assert that it's OK if you don't love parenting every minute. This is *not* an argument against having kids or loving them! The authors are simply trying to let the millions of guilt-ridden moms in this country off the hook, because being a parent isn't easy and it's so much harder when the media suggests otherwise. How this message can be perceived as "anti-child," as a number of reviewers here seem to suggest, is beyond me. So many mothers blame themselves if they aren't euphoric over every dirty diaper and spilled sippy cup. We believe the problem is within *us* and that if we only tried harder, we'd fit those media images. Why aren't we looking at the ways society fails to support mothers -- and fathers? Corporate America and the government get off scott-free, when in reality these institutions could be doing so much more to truly support families. "The Mommy Myth" shines a light on these unasked questions, and encourages mothers to stop blaming themselves and demand more from the institutions that benefit from our efforts to raise responsible, productive future workers and citizens.